Wednesday

Oct 31, 2018 at 11:08 AMOct 31, 2018 at 11:08 AM

Like her character in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, Melissa McCarthy has experienced a bit of a creative slump, schlepping her way through a series of disappointments like “The Happytime Murders,” “Life of the Party” and “The Boss.” But thanks to a regrettable decision by Julianne Moore, McCarthy is back in a big way with the best role of her career as celebrity biographer Lee Israel, a lovable felon who wrote the book on what might possibly be the slyest scam ever pulled on Manhattan’s pretentious literati.

The less you know about Israel’s outlaw antics the better. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” plays with its fact-based story of how a desperate-and-destitute Israel, with the help of a bon vivant hustler in Richard E. Grant’s Jack Hock, generated thousands of dollars by forging letters alleged to have been written by a who’s who of New York’s most celebrated authors. Some of the 400 missives were real, stolen from the New York and Yale libraries, but she mostly created her own communiques in an elaborate forgery scheme aimed at preying on the rabidness of collectors of literary memorabilia with no idea they were buying fakes.

That’s all you need know about the plot. Besides, I’d rather gush over McCarthy’s flawless performance as Israel, a misanthropic miscreant whose thievery is miraculously endearing. Part of that attraction is because Israel’s gullible victims were so unctuously priggish. But it’s more the unceasing likability of McCarthy, even when her character is behaving badly. It’s an all-too-rare turn in which she’s allowed to draw on her impressive dramatic skills as much as her comedic ones. It’s very much in the vein of primo Ruth Gordon; an antihero who’s acerbic but gentle, selfish but giving and sloppy but sharp, particularly in Israel’s remarkable ability to consistently think on her feet.

McCarthy’s so perfect for the part, it’s hard to fathom that she wasn’t the first choice to play the unkempt “cat lady,” who dressed like a high-class bag woman, never wore makeup and cursed like a sailor. It was supposed to go to Julianne Moore, at least until “creative differences” got in the way. But for the life of me, I can’t envision her bringing the level of realism McCarthy does. With her, everything feels natural and lived in, right down to the cantankerous attitude that leads to Israel being locked out by her agent (Jane Curtin, terrific in a too-short role), old acquaintances, even antiquarian proprietors who refused to buy the old, dusty books she was fiercely attempting to hawk to make ends meet.

Once the toast of New York, cracking the Times’ best-seller list with biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and journalist and game-show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, Israel quickly fell out of favor when her unauthorized profile of cosmetics queen Estee Lauder went straight to the bargain bin. When we meet Israel, she’s shopping a biography on comedian Fanny Brice that no publisher wants to touch, largely because it isn’t the type of book readers are looking for in 1991. She’s also told she needs to be more personable and schmooze more, meaning grovel. Like that’s ever going to happen.

Then her beloved cat, Jersey, falls ill, and in order to treat him — and pay the rent — the penniless Israel makes every legal attempt to raise the cash. And when that fails, she turns to the only valuable thing she owns: A signed, tear-stained letter from Katharine Hepburn thanking Israel for the nice piece she wrote about her in Esquire on the eve of the death of her dearest friend, Spencer Tracy. It fetches Israel a wad of cash from a collector (Dolly Wells), who takes a potential romantic liking to Israel. Even more, it seeds the germs of an idea to fabricate similar-type letters signed by the likes of Noel Coward, Edna Ferber and Dorothy Parker and written in their distinct voice.

The money flows in as fast as the flies infesting her squalid Riverside Drive apartment. Or, at least it does until buyers start getting wise. That’s where Grant’s Jack Hock enters the picture, posing as her “front.” Together, they form a most-charming criminal enterprise that enjoins the openly gay dandy and the deeply closeted lesbian into a symbiotic friendship that’s as funny as it is moving. And the reason it’s so powerful is how adoringly McCarthy and Grant play off each other: She, sullen and pragmatic; he, flamboyant and fanciful. The only thing they really have in common is that they’re broke.

McCarthy and Grant share a commonality, too, in that both are odds-on favorites to pick up Oscar nominations for their impeccable work in a movie that thrives on its one-two punch of a fast-rising director in Marielle Heller (the overlooked “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”) and a couple of well-established writers in Nicole Holofcener (“Enough Said”) and Jeff Whitty (the Tony-winning “Avenue Q”), who lovingly adapt Israel’s scurrilous memoir of the same name. What makes their combined work so persistently compelling is the layering they delicately compile, making “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” not just a story about Israel, but also one about loneliness and compassion, the fickleness of friendship and the arduous struggle for self-worth.

It’s that last quest where McCarthy really sinks her teeth, taking us along on a fascinating character arc in which Israel morphs from put-upon loser to a level of importance the author could never have imagined for herself. Sure, it was built on criminality, but that didn’t stop Israel from feeling proud at what she had accomplished in both making lots of money and exposing the greed and pompousness of so-called literary experts she so easily fooled. It didn’t end well for her, but neither did it for the idiots she hoodwinked (including one played by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone). They lost thousands, but she gained the knowledge that she knew far more about “the greats” than the experts. She was able to emulate her heroes and their unique writing style to a degree that the “pros” no longer could tell fact from fiction. That takes talent.

In the end, Heller leaves it for us to decide if what Israel did — and sacrificed — was worth it. It cost the author her freedoms, made her even more enemies in addition to the many she already had, but it somehow gave her value that only she could appraise. To the outsider, she might look like a loser; but for Israel, the only one who counts, it was the time of her life. Ironically, it also provided fodder for her most acclaimed book, one that has now been adapted to the screen. It’s something that Israel would have loved, but like everything else in her life that chance to enjoy it was taken from her, this time by death. And for me, that’s the saddest story of all.

Sister Publication

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
Boonville Daily News - Boonville, MO ~ 412 High St. Boonville, MO 65233 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service